Author: Fred Blahnik

…..he could think of only one good reason why she wasn’t returning his myriad phone calls, but thirty lesser ones.  Naturally, as in all matters involving the heart and the lovelorn, those other thirty reasons held disproportionate sway and Prince I.M. Utterly Naive optimistically picked up his cell phone and tried once more….and then again after that and again after that and again after that.  Love is blinding to the senses—All right?—but it is also blinding to one’s rational thinking and our ability to process obvious cues. Tragically, this exasperated buffoon hasn’t learned these invaluable life lessons quite yet but trust me, after weeks and weeks of unanswered communiques and having his nose rubbed humiliatingly in ripe feces he will discover what so many men have painfully been forced to acknowledge before him:  Women are unfathomably complex, unpredictable creatures who specialize in eviscerating male egos, albeit sometimes probably unknowingly ….

Every day that you continue functioning on the north side of the soil rather than its dark, seamy underbelly is all the more reason you should feel supremely lucky and grateful to be alive here on our bewitching little blue planet innocuously named Earth.  No other considerations.  No other caveats.  Nothing else matters.  Now…..what you choose to make of those additional days is entirely up to you, but your ongoing presence here lies in the hands of Someone far greater and knowing than any of us puny earthlings.  Be grateful for sentience and sentience alone.  Do not commit the cardinal mistake of asking for or gratuitously expecting anything more than that.  If saccharine largesse serendipitously comes your way—Great and more power to you!—but if it finds its way to other, sometimes undeserving individuals, do not begrudge them for their ethereal fortune and for damned sure don’t curse the Supreme Being for being “unfair”.  The firmament and Whoever oversees it doesn’t operate in an immanently logical manner, and neither do human lives and the crazily random destinies said lives follow.

…..their kinship was real and could easily have been confirmed by paternity testing if for some reason that ever became necessary, but other than DNA there was no element of closeness connecting them.  Blood was not thicker than water in their case, and love—the main acknowledged staple of family relationships throughout the ages—did not pass freely between the two brothers.  Rather, an odd vacuum existed where there should have been love—a vacuum packed chockfull of indifference and wariness and even ambivalence—and, surprisingly, the obstinate pair readily accepted this peculiar dynamic and did not find such an accommodation the least bit unusual.  They didn’t get along, they didn’t respect each other, they hardly ever fraternized except when traditional family alliances mandated they must…..and yet neither brother found this bizarre situation even remotely disturbing. It was just the way the world existed, no different than the stars in the sky or the molten stew roiling at the Earth’s core…..

Stasis is our friend, okay?  If something ain’t broke, for God’s sake don’t don a dunce cap and stubbornly try fixing it!  Change in and of itself is not inherently evil, but those who advocate for change merely because they are bored to death and yearn to disrupt the status quo are anarchists at best, stupid meddlers at worst.  Stasis and change are like identical twins, in that neither is better than the other until one starts acting up and needlessly disrupting things, at which point you step in and take decisive action to rectify the situation…..but not one second earlier!  Change can readily make a situation better, but it can just as easily make a situation worse.  Knowing the difference and when change will truly be beneficial pretty much defines the word “intelligence”.

…..and the days grew progressively longer as he got older, while the dreams of his lost youth shriveled up—one by one by one—and gradually vanished into thin air until there were none left for him to treasure. Is this then, he resignedly thought to himself, the real curse of old age:  That I must now endure each week-long day—one piled slavishly atop the other like an endless row of felled dominoes—with nothing to look forward to other than my eventual cessation of breathing and ensuing chemical transformation from a dynamic flesh-and-blood organism into an elementary carbon derivative?  He stood up at this juncture, sighed, stretched his limbs in exaggerated fashion akin to a creaky old dog just awoken from a sun-bathed nap, and shambled off to his congested medicine cabinet to indulge in some life-enhancing—and life-lengthening—nourishment.  This certainly doesn’t feel very much like living, he thought, but then again it sure as hell beats the holy shit out of the alternative…..so far, at least…..

…..she thought fame would be the end-all, cure-all answer to her litany of ailments—both physical and emotional—but she soon learned otherwise.  She discovered that fame is a prison every bit as constraining as the poverty and anonymity she had serially grown to loath in her youth.  Return to that pitiful station in life?  No, she harbored no desire to turn around and trudge backward in time either, even if she had been able to but which of course she wasn’t.  And then a bolt of wisdom struck her—a bolt that had been hiding inside her body all these years, lying low and skulking about in some previously unexplored dark chasm—and she realized that people aren’t meant to live blissful, happy lives.  They just aren’t!  Genuine happiness is a sham, a ruse, an artifice; genuine happiness over an extended period of time is a heartless deception.  Happiness at its very core is a grandiose hallucination cruelly perpetuated from generation to generation by a small but vocal coalition of fantasts and naïfs.  Said is merely the winsome, unrealistic stuff centerpiecing political campaigns, bridal showers, bar mitzvahs, and fairy tales. Real life is an apex predator that is wholly amoral and constantly on the prowl for unwitting victims; it affords precious little time for nonsensical tropes like sanguinity and merrymaking. In the sobering big scheme of things, those much-sought-after entities face extinction and are every bit as endangered as the Siberian tiger and polar ice caps……

Growing old is undeniably a privilege and a sublime blessing and all that other smarmy good stuff, of course, yet it is nonetheless impossible to look back upon one’s youth without a giant tranche of envy and regret.  Envy…..for the bounty of temptations readily available for anybody short-in-the-tooth, yet when one steps back and studies those callow rascals for but a minute, it is soon revealed they are taking everything around them for granted.  Total, unadulterated granted.  Shame on them too!  Yes, shame on the spoiled, presumptuous young bastards!!  They should know better, for sure…..but then again, I never did when I was their age either, did I?  Regret…..for not taking full advantage of that smorgasbord of luscious temptations when they were right there for the plucking.  Never forget this most salient of facts, Reader:  One’s natural lusts and beastly desires never go away or even diminish a single iota, even as one’s physical ability to consummate those same divinities insidiously dissipates as the years heap on top of each other and the Grim Reaper becomes ever more audacious as he continues sharpening his ghastly scythe.  Such is life, and such are the cruel ironies attendant to same.

Anyone who professes to be an open book is also a decidedly boring read.  You see, I—along with most other people, I feel quite safe in opining—don’t want to find an “open book” anywhere in my personal library; I would much prefer a stimulating page-turner that’s guaranteed to hold my attention for more than a handful of minutes.  Openness and transparency are undoubtedly advantageous for every level of government, yet those same qualities hardly inspire interest and pique curiosity in interpersonal relationships.  Getting to know someone too easily is the perfect recipe for premature boredom and subsequently struggling to invent some novel excuse for parting ways without hurting the other’s feelings too badly.

NO ONE, not even big lottery winners and Average Joes dating Playboy centerfolds, can be lucky all the time and in every instance.  There most assuredly is a limit to fortuity.  To expect good fortune to shine on you indefinitely and for every one of your prayers to be answered posthaste is not only unrealistic, it also describes outlandish selfishness and an undeserved sense of entitlement.  Thus while good luck may be a welcome perquisite which pays you unexpected visits on rare occasions and pops up not unlike a guardian angel during some of the infrequent tough scrapes you have and will continue to experience in life, it surely is NOT a strategy by which you should lead life; it is NOT a substitute for hard work, ambition, and reasonable sacrifice and therefore should never be perceived as such.

Each morning when you wake up you are a totally different person from the one who fell asleep the night before…..the week before…..the month before…..the year before…..the decade before…..the partial life before.  Sleep does tricky things with our consciousness while we sleep, and the individual who wakes up the next morning is not precisely the same person who crawled blissfully into bed the night before.  We are constantly changing even if we don’t realize it, and those changes are cumulative and render us markedly different even if the person in the bathroom mirror looks achingly familiar and the clothes we wear fit exactly the same as before. Time changes us; it changes everyone; we exercise zero control over it irrespective of futile attempts to alter its trajectory.  I will be a different person tomorrow than I am today and so will you.  That said, most of these changes are internal as opposed to external, thus they are not readily apparent to eyes that are unvaryingly pointed in an outward direction.